The Gospel of St. Luke

Schmidt Number: S-2054

On-line since: 29th January, 2008

LECTURE ONE

Initiates
and Clairvoyants. The various Aspects of Initiation. The Four Gospels
considered in the light of spiritual-scientific Investigation.

During our last
meeting here some time ago we spoke of the deeper currents of
Christianity with particular reference to the Gospel of St. John and
of the great images and ideas accessible to man when he reflects
deeply upon this unique text.
[ 1 ]
More than once it has been emphasized that the very depths of Christianity
are illuminated by that Gospel and some of those who have heard
lecture-courses on the same subject might feel inclined to ask: If
the viewpoint reached through studying the Gospel of St. John may
truly be called the most profound, can it be widened or enriched in
any way by study of the other three Gospels of St. Luke, St. Matthew
and St. Mark? Again, those who tend to be mentally lazy might ask: If
the deepest depths of Christianity are to be found in the Gospel of
St. John, is it still necessary to study Christianity as presented in
the other Gospels, especially in the apparently less profound Gospel
of St. Luke?

Anyone who might put
this question believing such an attitude to be worthy of
consideration would be labouring under a complete misapprehension.
The scope of Christianity itself is infinite and light can be shed
upon it from the most diverse standpoints. Furthermore, as the
present course of lectures will show, although the Gospel of St. John
is a document of untold profundity, there are facts which can be
learnt from the Gospel of St. Luke and not from that of St. John. The
ideas which in the lectures on the Gospel of St. John we came to
recognize as among the most profound in Christianity, do not by any
means comprise all its depths. It is possible to penetrate these
depths from another starting-point altogether, basing our studies on
the Gospel of St. Luke viewed in the light of Anthroposophy.

Let us once again
recall facts in support of the statement that there is something to
be gained from the Gospel of St. Luke even if the depths of the
Gospel of St. John have been exhaustively studied. A fact revealed to
the student of Anthroposophy by every line of the Gospel of St. John
is that records such as the Gospels were composed by individuals
who, as initiates and clairvoyants, possessed deeper insight than
other men into the nature of existence. In everyday parlance the
terms ‘initiate’ and ‘clairvoyant’ may be
synonymous. But if our studies of Anthroposophy are to lead us into
the deeper strata of spiritual life, we must distinguish between one
who is an ‘initiate’ and one who is a
‘clairvoyant’, for they represent two distinct
categories of human beings who have found their way into the spheres
of super-sensible existence. There is a difference between an initiate
and a clairvoyant, although an initiate may at the same time be a
clairvoyant, and a clairvoyant an initiate of a certain grade. To
distinguish with exactitude between these two categories of human
beings you must recall the facts described in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,
[ 2 ]
remembering that strictly speaking there are three stages on the path
leading beyond ordinary perception of the world.

The first kind of
knowledge accessible to man can be described by saying: he beholds
the world through his senses and assimilates what he perceives by
means of his intellect and the other faculties of his soul. Beyond
this, there are three further stages of knowledge, of cognition: the
first is the stage of Imagination, Imaginative Cognition, the second
is the stage of Inspiration, and the third is the stage of
Intuition — but the term ‘Intuition’ must be
understood in its true sense.

The faculty of
Imaginative Cognition is possessed by one before whose eye of spirit
all that lies behind the world of the senses is unfolded in mighty,
cosmic pictures — but these pictures do not in the least
resemble anything we call by this name in everyday life. Apart from
the difference that the pictures revealed by Imaginative Cognition
are independent of the laws of three-dimensional space, other
characteristics make it impossible for them to be compared with
anything in the world of the senses.

An idea of the world
of Imagination may be gained in the following way. Suppose someone
were able to extract from a plant in front of him everything
perceptible to the sense of sight as ‘colour’, so that
this hovered freely in the air. If he were to do nothing more than
draw out the colour from the plant, a lifeless colour-form would
hover before him. But to the clairvoyant such a colour-form is
anything but a lifeless picture, for when he extracts the colour from
the objects, then, through the preparation he has undergone and the
exercises he has practised, this colour-picture begins to be animated
by spirit just as in the physical world it was filled by the living
substance of the plant. He then has before him, not a lifeless
colour-form but freely moving coloured light, glistening, sparkling,
full of inner life; each colour is the expression of the particular
nature of a spiritual being imperceptible in the world of the
physical senses. That is to say, the colour in the physical plant
becomes for the clairvoyant the expression of spiritual beings. Now
imagine a world filled with such colour-forms, reflected in manifold
ways and in perpetual metamorphosis; your vision must not be confined
to the colours, as it might be when confronting a painting of
glimmering colour-reflections, but you must imagine it all as the
expression of beings of soul-and-spirit, so that you can say to
yourselves: ‘When a green colour-picture flashes up it
expresses to me the fact that an intellectual being is behind it;
or when a reddish colour-picture flashes up it is to me the expression
of a being with a fiery, violent nature.’ Now imagine this
whole sea of interweaving colours I might equally well say a sea of
interplaying sensations of tone, taste, or smell, for all these are
the expressions of beings of soul-and-spirit behind them — and
you have what is called the ‘Imaginative’ world, the
world of Imagination. It is nothing to which the word
‘imagination’ (fancy) in its ordinary sense could be
applied; it is a real world, requiring a mode of comprehension
different from that derived from the senses.

Within this world of
Imagination you encounter everything that is behind the sense-world
and is imperceptible to the physical senses — for instance, the
etheric and astral bodies. A man whose knowledge of the world is
derived from this clairvoyant, Imaginative perception, becomes
acquainted with the outward aspect of higher beings, just as you
become acquainted with the outward, physical aspect of a man in the
physical world who, let us say, passes in front of you in the
street. You know more about him when there is an opportunity of
talking with him. His words then give you an impression differing
from the one he makes upon you when you look at him in the street. In
the case of many a man whom you pass by (to mention this one example
only) you cannot observe whether his soul is moved by inner joy or
grief, sorrow or delight. But you can discover this if you converse
with him. In the one case his outward aspect is conveyed to you
through everything you can perceive without his assistance; in the
other case he expresses his very self to you. The same applies to the
beings of the super-sensible world. A clairvoyant who comes to
recognize these beings through Imaginative Cognition knows only their
outward aspect. But he hears them give expression to their very
selves when he rises from Imaginative Knowledge to Knowledge through
Inspiration. He then has actual intercourse with these beings. They
communicate to him from their inmost selves what and who
they are. Inspiration is therefore a higher stage of knowledge than
Imagination, and more is learnt about the beings of the world of
soul-and-spirit at the stage of Inspiration than can be learnt
through Imagination.

A still higher stage
of knowledge is that of Intuition — but the word must be taken
in its spiritual-scientific sense, not in that of day-to-day
parlance, when anything that occurs to one, however hazy and
nebulous, may be called ‘intuition’. In our sense,
Intuition is a form of knowledge thanks to which we not only listen
spiritually to what the beings communicate to us, but we become one
with the very beings themselves. This is a very lofty stage of
spiritual knowledge for it requires, at the outset, that there shall
be in the human being that quality of universal love which causes him
to make no distinction between himself and the other beings in his
spiritual environment, but to pour forth his very self into the
environment; thus he no longer remains outside but lives within the
beings with whom he has spiritual communion. Because this can take
place only in a spiritual world, the expression
‘Intuition’, i.e. ‘to dwell in the God’ is
entirely appropriate. Thus there are three stages of knowledge of the
super-sensible worlds: Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

It is possible, of
course, to attain all these three stages of super-sensible knowledge,
but it may also be that in some one incarnation the stage of
Imagination only is reached. Then the spheres of the spiritual world
attainable through Inspiration and Intuition remain hidden from the
clairvoyant concerned. In our present age it is not usual for a
person to be led to the higher stages of spiritual experience before
having passed through the stage of Imagination; it is hardly possible
for anyone to omit the stage of Imagination and be led at once to the
stages of Inspiration and Intuition. But what would not be
appropriate to-day, could happen and actually did happen in certain
other periods of the evolution of man.

There were times when
Imagination on the one hand and Inspiration and Intuition on the
other were apportioned to different individuals. In certain
Mystery-centres there were men whose eyes of spirit were open in such
a way that they were clairvoyant in the sphere of Imagination and
that world of symbolical pictures was accessible to them. Because
with this grade of clairvoyance, such men said: ‘For this
incarnation I renounce the attainment of the higher stages of
Inspiration and Intuition’, they made themselves capable of
seeing clearly and with exactitude in the world of Imagination. They
underwent much training in order to develop vision of that world. But
one thing was essential for them. Anyone who wants to confine his
vision to the world of Imagination and gives up any attempt to
advance to Inspiration and Intuition, lives in a world of
uncertainty. This world of flowing Imaginations is, so to say,
boundless, and if left to its own resources the soul floats hither
and thither without being really aware of its direction or goal. In
those times, therefore, and among peoples where certain human beings
renounced the higher stages of knowledge, it was necessary for those
whose clairvoyance had reached the stage of Imagination to attach
themselves with utter devotion to leaders whose capacities of
spiritual perception were open to Inspiration and Intuition. For
Inspiration and Intuition alone can give such certainty in regard to
the spiritual world that a man knows with full assurance: Thither
leads the path — towards a definite goal! Without Inspiration it
is not possible to say: There is the path; I must follow it in order
to reach a goal! Whoever, therefore, cannot say this must entrust
himself to the wise guidance of someone who says it to him. Hence in
so many quarters it is constantly emphasized, and rightly so, that
whoever rises, to begin with, to the stage of Imagination, must
attach himself inwardly to a Guru — a leader who gives both
direction and aim to his experiences. It was also advisable in
certain epochs — but this is no longer the case to-day —
to allow other individuals to omit the stage of Imagination and to
lead them at once to Inspiration or, if possible, to Intuition. Such
men renounced the possibility of perceiving the Imaginative pictures
of the spiritual world around them; they lent themselves only to such
impressions from the spiritual world as issue from the inner life of
the beings there. They listened with their ears of spirit to the
utterances of the beings of the spiritual world. Suppose there is a
screen between you and another man whom you do not see but only hear
him speaking behind the screen. It is certainly possible to renounce
pictorial vision of the spiritual world in order to be led more
quickly to the stage of hearing the utterances of the spiritual
beings. No matter whether a person sees the pictures of the world of
Imagination or not — if he is able to apprehend with spiritual
ears what the beings in the spiritual world communicate regarding
themselves, we say of him that he is endowed with the power to hear
the ‘inner word’ — in contrast to the outer word used
in the physical world between man and man.

We can thus conceive
that there are people who, without beholding the world of
Imaginations, are endowed with the power to apprehend the inner word
and can hear and communicate the utterances of spiritual beings.
There were periods in the evolution of humanity when, within the
Mysteries, these two forms of super-sensible cognition worked in
co-operation. Each individual who had renounced the faculty of
perception possessed by another, could develop greater clarity and
definition in his own faculty and at certain periods this resulted in
a truly wonderful co-operation within the Mysteries. There were
clairvoyants who had specially trained themselves to see the world of
Imaginative pictures, and there were others who, having passed over
the world of Imagination, had trained themselves to receive the inner
word into their souls through Inspiration. And so the one could
communicate to the other the experiences made possible by his
particular training. This was possible in times when some degree of
confidence reigned between one man and another; to-day it is out of
the question, simply because of the character of our age. Nowadays
one man has not such strong belief in another that he would listen to
his descriptions of the pictures of the world of Imagination and
then, honestly believing those descriptions to be accurate,
supplement them with what he himself knows through Inspiration.
Nowadays, everyone wants to see it all himself — and that is
natural in our age. Very few people would be satisfied with a
one-sided development of Imagination such as was taken for granted in
certain epochs. In our present time, therefore, it is necessary for a
man to be led through the three stages of higher knowledge without
omitting any one of them.

At each stage of
super-sensible knowledge we encounter the great mysteries connected
with the Christ Event, about which all three forms of cognition
— Imaginative, Inspirational, Intuitive — have infinitely
much to say.

If
with this in mind we turn our attention to the four
Gospels, we may say that the Gospel of St. John is written from the
vantage-point of one who in the fullest sense was an Initiate,
cognisant at the stage of Intuition of the mysteries of the
super-sensible world, and who therefore describes the Christ Event as
revealed by the vision of Intuition. But if close attention is paid
to the distinctive characteristics of St. John's Gospel it will
have to be admitted that the features standing out most clearly are
presented from the standpoint of Inspiration and Intuition, while
everything originating from the pictures of Imagination is shadowy
and lacks definition. Thus if we disregard what was still revealed to
him through Imagination, we may call the writer of St. John's
Gospel the messenger of everything relating to the Christ Event that
is vouchsafed to one endowed with the power of apprehending the inner
word at the stage of Intuition. Hence he describes the mysteries of
Christ's Kingdom as receiving their character through the inner
Word, or Logos. Knowledge through Inspiration and Intuition is the
source of the Gospel of St. John.

It is different in
the case of the other three Gospels, and not one of their writers
expressed his message as clearly as did the writer of the Gospel of
St. Luke. In a short but remarkable preface it is said, in effect,
that many others had previously attempted to collect and set forth
the stories in circulation concerning the events in Palestine; but
that for the sake of accuracy and order the writer of this Gospel is
now undertaking to present the things which ... and now come
significant words ... could be understood by those who from the
beginning were ‘eye-witnesses and servants (ministers) of the
Word’ — that is the usual
rendering. The aim of the writer of this Gospel is therefore to
communicate what eye-witnesses — it would be better to say
‘seers’ (Selbstseher) — and servants of the Word
had to say. In the sense of St. Luke's Gospel,
‘seers’ are men who through Imaginative Cognition can
penetrate into the world of pictures and there behold the Christ
Event; people specially trained to perceive these Imaginations are
seers with accurate and clear vision at the same time as being
‘servants of the Word’ — a significant phrase
— and the writer of St. Luke's Gospel uses their
communications as a foundation. He does not say
‘possessors’ of the Word, because such persons would have
reached the stage of Inspiration in the fullest sense; he says
‘servants’ of the Word — people who could count less upon
Inspirations than upon Imaginations in their own knowledge but for
whom communications from the world of Inspiration were nevertheless
available. The results of Inspirational Cognition were communicated
to them and they could proclaim what their inspired teachers had made
known to them. They were ‘servants’, not
‘possessors’ of the Word.

Thus the Gospel of
St. Luke is founded upon the communications of seers, themselves
knowers of the world of Imagination; they are those who, having
learnt to express their visions of that world through means made
possible by their inspired teachers, had themselves become
‘servants of the Word’.

Here again is an
example of the exactitude of the Gospel records and of the need to
understand the words in the strictly literal sense. In texts based
upon spiritual knowledge, everything is exact to a degree often
undreamed of by modern man.

But we must now again
remember — as always when such matters are considered from the
anthroposophical standpoint — that, for spiritual science, the
Gospels themselves are not original sources of knowledge in the
actual sense. One who stands strictly on the ground of spiritual
science will not necessarily take a statement to be the truth simply
because it stands in the Gospels. The spiritual scientist does not
draw his knowledge from written documents but from the yields of
spiritual investigation. Communications made by beings of the
spiritual world to the initiate and the clairvoyant in the present
age — these are the sources of knowledge for spiritual science.
And in a certain respect these sources are the same in our age as in
the times just described to you. Hence in our age too, those who have
insight into the world of Imagination may be called clairvoyants, but
only those who can rise to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition
can be called ‘Initiates’. In our present age the
expressions ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘initiate’ are
not necessarily synonymous.

The content of the
Gospel of St. John could be based only upon knowledge possessed by an
Initiate capable of rising to the stages of Inspiration and
Intuition. The contents of the other three Gospels could be
based upon the communications of persons endowed with Imaginative
clairvoyance but not yet able themselves to rise to the stages of
Inspiration and Intuition. If therefore we adhere strictly to this
distinction, St. John's Gospel is based upon Initiation, and
the other three, especially that of St. Luke — according to
what the writer himself says — upon Clairvoyance. Because this
is the case, and because everything that is revealed to the vision of
a highly trained clairvoyant is introduced, this Gospel gives us
well-defined pictures of what is contained in the Gospel of St. John
in faint impressions only. In order to make the difference even more
obvious, let me say the following.

Although it would
hardly ever be the case to-day, let us suppose a man were initiated
in such a way that the worlds of Inspiration and of Intuition were
open to him but that he was not clairvoyant in the world of
Imagination. Suppose such a man met another, perhaps not initiated
but to whom the whole world of Imaginations was open. This man would
be able to communicate a great deal to the first who might possibly
only be able to explain it through Inspiration but could not himself
see it, having no faculty of clairvoyance. There are many to-day who
are clairvoyant without being initiates; the reverse is hardly ever
the case. Nevertheless it might conceivably happen that someone who
had been initiated, could not, although possessing the gift of
clairvoyance, for some reason or other perceive the Imaginations in a
particular instance. A clairvoyant would then be able to tell such a
man a great deal as yet unknown to him.

It must be strongly
emphasized that Anthroposophy relies upon no other source than that
of the Initiates, and that the texts of the Gospels are not the
actual sources of its knowledge. The fount of anthroposophical
knowledge is investigated to-day independently of any historical
records. But then we turn to the records and compare the findings of
spiritual-scientific research with them. What Anthroposophy can at
all times discover about the Christ Event without the help of any
documentary record is found again in the Gospel of St. John,
presented in a most sublime way. Hence its supreme value, for it
shows us that at the time when it was composed a man was living who
wrote as one initiated into the spiritual world can write to-day. The
same voice, as it were, that can be heard to-day, sounds across to us
from the depths of the centuries.

The same can be said
of the other Gospels, including that of St. Luke. It is not the
pictures delineated by the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke that are
for us the source of knowledge of the higher worlds; the source for
us lies in the results of ascent into the super-sensible world. When
we speak of the Christ Event, a source for us is also that great
tableau of pictures and Imaginations appearing when we direct our
gaze to the beginning of our era. We compare what thus reveals itself
with the pictures and Imaginations described in the Gospel of St.
Luke; and this course of lectures will show how the Imaginative
pictures accessible to man to-day compare with the descriptions given
in that Gospel.

The truth is that
there is only one source for spiritual investigation when directed to
the events of the past. This source does not lie in external records;
no stones dug out of the earth, no documents preserved in archives,
no treatises written by historians either with or without insight
— none of these things is the source of spiritual science. What
we are able to read in the imperishable Akashic Chronicle
— that is the source of spiritual science. The possibility exists
of knowing what has happened in the past without reference to external
records. Modern man has thus two ways of acquiring information about the
past. He can take the documents and the historical records when he wants
to learn something about outer events, or the religious scripts when he
wants to learn something about the conditions of spiritual life. Or
else he can ask: What have those men to say before whose spiritual
vision lies that imperishable Chronicle known as the ‘Akashic
Chronicle’ — that mighty tableau in which there is
registered whatever has at any time come to pass in the evolution of
the world, of the earth and of humanity?

Whoever raises his
consciousness into the spiritual world learns gradually to read this
chronicle. It is no ordinary script. Think of the course of events,
just as they happened, presented to your spiritual vision; think, let
us say, of the Emperor Augustus and all his deeds standing before you
in a cloud-like picture. The picture stands there before the
spiritual-scientific investigator and he can at any time evoke the
experience anew. He requires no external evidence. He need only
direct his gaze to a definite point in cosmic or human happenings and
the events will present themselves to him in a spiritual picture. In
this way the spiritual gaze can survey the ages of the past, and what
is there perceived is recorded as the findings of spiritual
investigation.

What happened at the
beginning of our era can be perceived by spiritual vision and
compared, for example, with what is related in the Gospel of St.
Luke. Then the spiritual investigator recognizes that at that time
too there were seers able to behold the past; and moreover the
accounts they give of happenings in their own times can be compared
with what is revealed to-day by spiritual investigation of the
Akashic Chronicle.

Again and again it
must be realized that we do not have recourse to outer records but to
the actual findings of spiritual investigation and that we then try
to rediscover these results in the outer records. The value of the
records themselves is thereby enhanced and we can come to a decision
about the truth of their contents on the strength of our own
investigations. They lie before us as, even more faithful expression
of the truth because we ourselves are able to recognize the truth.
But a statement such as this must not be made without at the same
time affirming that this ‘reading in the Akashic
Chronicle’ is by no means as easy as observation of events in
the physical world! With the help of an example I should like to give
you an idea of certain difficulties that may arise.

We know from
elementary Anthroposophy that man consists of physical body, etheric
body, astral body and Ego. The moment we are no longer observing man
on the physical plane but rise into the spiritual world, the
difficulties begin. When we have a human being physically before us,
we see a unity formed by physical body, etheric body, astral body and
Ego. Whoever observes a human being during waking life has all this
before him as unity, but if it is necessary for some reason to rise
into the higher worlds in order to observe a human being, the
difficulties at once begin. Suppose, for example, we wish to observe
a human being in his totality while he is asleep during the night,
and rise into the world of Imagination in order, let us say, to
perceive his astral body — which is now outside the physical
body. The human being is now divided into two. What I am describing
will seldom occur in this particular form, for observation of the
human being is comparatively easy, but it will help to convey an idea
of the difficulties in question.

Suppose
someone goes into a room where a number of people are asleep.
He sees their physical bodies lying there and, if he is clairvoyant,
their etheric bodies too; at a higher stage of clairvoyance he sees
their astral bodies. But in the astral world everything
interpenetrates — including, of course, the astral bodies of
human beings. Although it would not often happen to a trained
clairvoyant, when looking at a number of sleeping people he might
mistake which astral body belonged to some particular physical body
below. As I said, it is an unlikely occurrence because this is one of
the first stages of actual vision and because anyone who attains it
is well trained in how to distinguish in such a case. But the
difficulties become very considerable when spiritual beings —
not human beings — are observed in the spiritual world. As a
matter of fact the difficulties are already great if a human being
is to be observed, not as he is at present, but in his totality, as
he passes through incarnations. Thus if you observe a human being now
living and ask yourself: Where was his Ego in his previous
incarnation? you have to go through the Devachanic world to reach his
former incarnation. You must be able to establish which Ego has
always belonged to the preceding incarnations of the person in
question. You must hold together, in an intricate way, the
continuous Ego and the various stages down on the Earth. Mistakes
are very possible here and error can very easily occur when looking
for an Ego in its earlier bodies. In the higher worlds, therefore, it
is not easy to maintain the connection between everything belonging
to a human personality and his former incarnations as inscribed in
the Akashic Chronicle.

Suppose someone has
before him a man — let us call him John Smith — and as a
clairvoyant or initiate he asks: ‘Who were the physical
ancestors of this man?’ — Let us assume that all external
records have been lost and there is only the Akashic Chronicle upon
which to rely. It would be a matter of having to discover from the
Akashic Chronicle the physical ancestors of the man — the
father, mother, grandfather, and so on, in order to see how the
physical body evolved in the line of physical descent. But then there
might be the further question: ‘What were the earlier
incarnations of this man?’ To answer that question an entirely
different path must be taken than when looking for the physical
ancestors. It may be necessary to go back through long, long ages in
order to arrive at the previous incarnations of the Ego.

Already you have two
streams: the physical body as it stands before you is not a
completely new creation, for it springs from the ancestors in the
line of physical heredity; nor is the Ego a completely new creation,
for it is linked with its previous incarnations. The same holds good
for the intermediate members, the etheric and astral bodies. Most of
you know that the etheric body is not a completely new creation but
that it too may have taken a path leading through the most diverse
forms. The etheric body of Zarathustra reappeared in Moses.
[ 3 ]
It was the same etheric body. If we were to seek out the physical
ancestors of Moses this would give us one line; if we were to seek
out the ancestors of the etheric body of Moses we should
get another, quite different line; here we should come to the etheric
body of Zarathustra and to other etheric bodies. Just as we have to
trace quite different lines for the physical body and the etheric
body, the same applies to the astral body. Each separate member of
the human being might lead to very diverse streams. Thus the etheric
body may be the etheric re-embodiment of an etheric body that
belonged to a different individuality altogether — not by any
means the same in which the Ego was formerly incarnated. And the same
can be said of the astral body.

When we rise into the
higher worlds in order to investigate the several members of a human
being, the individual streams all take different directions, and in
following them we come to very intricate processes in the spiritual
world. Whoever wishes to understand a human being from the
vantage-point of spiritual investigation, must describe him not
merely as a descendant of his ancestors, not merely as having derived
his etheric body or his astral body from this or that being, but he
must describe the paths taken by all these four members until they
unite in the present individual. This cannot be done all at once. For
instance, we may trace the path followed by the etheric body and
reach important conclusions. Someone else may trace the path of the
astral body. The one may lay more stress on the etheric body, the
other on the astral body, and frame his descriptions accordingly. To
those who do not notice everything said about an individual by men
who are clairvoyant, it will make no difference whether one says this
and another that; it will seem to them that the same entity is being
described. In their eyes the one who describes the physical
personality only and the other who describes the etheric body are
both speaking of the same being — John Smith.

All this can give you
an idea of the complexity of circumstances and conditions encountered
when it is a question of describing the nature of any phenomenon in
the world — whether a human or any other being — from the
standpoint of clairvoyant research or Initiation-knowledge. I was
obliged to say the foregoing because it will help you to understand
that only the most extensive investigation in the Akashic Chronicle
can present any being in full clarity to the eyes of spirit.

The Being who stands
before us as the Gospel of St. John describes Him — no matter
whether we speak of Him as Jesus of Nazareth before the Baptism by
John or as Christ after the Baptism — that Being stands before
us with an Ego, an astral body, an etheric body and physical body. To
give a full description according to the Akashic Chronicle of the
Being who was Christ Jesus, we must trace the paths traversed by the
four members of His nature in the course of the evolution of
humanity. Only then can we rightly understand Him. It is here a
question of grasping the meaning of the information regarding the
Christ Event given by modern spiritual-scientific investigation, for
light must be shed on apparent contradictions in the four
Gospels.

I have often pointed
out why purely materialistic research cannot recognize the supreme
value and profundity of the Gospel of St. John: it is because those
who carry out this research cannot understand that a higher Initiate
sees differently, more deeply, than the others. Those who have doubts
about the Gospel of St. John attempt to establish a kind of
conformity between the three synoptic Gospels. But conformity will be
difficult to establish and sustain if it is based only upon the
external, material happenings. What will be of particular importance
in tomorrow's lecture, namely the life of Jesus of Nazareth
before the Baptism by John, is described by two Evangelists, by the
writers of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and external,
materialistic observation will find differences there that are in no
way less than those which must be assumed to exist between the Gospel
of St. John and the other three Gospels.

Let us take the facts:
The writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew relates how the birth of
the Creator of Christianity was announced beforehand, how the birth
took place, how Magi, having seen the ‘star’, came from
the East, being led by the star to the place where the Redeemer was
born; he describes how Herod's attention was aroused and how,
in order to escape the massacre of the babes in Bethlehem, the
parents of the Redeemer fled with the child to Egypt; when Herod was
dead it was made known to Joseph, the father of Jesus, that they
might return, but for fear of Herod's successor they went to
Nazareth instead of returning to Bethlehem.

To-day I will leave
aside the Baptist's proclamation, but I want to draw attention
to the fact that if we compare the Gospels of St. Luke and St.
Matthew we find the annunciation of Jesus of Nazareth described quite
differently; the one Gospel relates that it was made to Mary, the
other that it was made to Joseph. From the Gospel of St. Luke we
learn that the parents of Jesus of Nazareth lived at that place and
went to Bethlehem on the occasion of the enrolling. While they were
there, Jesus was born. Then came the circumcision, after eight days
— nothing is said about a flight into Egypt — and a short
time afterwards the child was presented in the temple; the customary
offering having been made, the parents returned with the child to
Nazareth. A remarkable incident is then described — how on the
occasion of a visit with his parents to Jerusalem the twelve-year-old
Jesus remained behind in the temple, how his parents sought and found
him there among those who expounded the scriptures, how among the
learned doctors of the Law he gave evidence of profound knowledge of
the scriptures. Then it is related how the parents took the child
home with them again, how he grew up ... and we hear nothing
particular about him from that time until the Baptism by John.

Here we have two
accounts of Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ descended into him.
Whoever wishes to reconcile the accounts must consider how, according
to the ordinary materialistic view, he can reconcile the story in the
Gospel of St. Matthew that directly after the birth of Jesus his
parents, Joseph and Mary, fled with the child into Egypt and
subsequently returned, with the other story of the presentation in
the temple narrated by St. Luke.

In these lectures we
shall find that what seems a complete contradiction to the ordinary
mind will be revealed as truth in the light of spiritual
investigation. Both accounts are true! — although presented
as accounts of events in the physical world they are in apparent
contradiction. Precisely the three synoptic Gospels of St. Matthew,
St. Mark and St. Luke ought to compel people to adopt a spiritual
conception of events in the history of humanity. For it is surely
obvious that nothing is attained by ignoring apparent contradictions
in such records or by speaking of ‘fiction’ when
realities prove too great an obstacle.

We shall have
opportunity here to speak of things of which there was no occasion to
speak in detail when we were studying the Gospel of St. John namely,
the events that took place before the Baptism by John and the descent
of the Christ into the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Many
riddles of vital significance concerning the essence of Christianity
will find their solution when — as the outcome of research into
the Akashic Chronicle — we hear of the being and nature of
Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ took possession of his three
bodies.

Tomorrow we shall
begin by considering the nature and the life of Jesus of Nazareth as
revealed in the Akashic Chronicle, and then ask ourselves: How does
the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth compare with what is described in
the Gospel of St. Luke as imparted by those who at that time were
‘seers’ or ‘servants’ of the Word, of the
Logos?

Notes:

1.
This lecture-course was given by Dr. Steiner in
Basle, November 1907.
It has not been published in English. Other lecture-courses
on the same subject, published in English, were given by him in
Hamburg, May 1908,
and in
Cassel, June–July 1909.
(See list of publications at the end of this volume.)